ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO DEVELOP THEIR OWN PROJECT THROUGH THE INCREASE OF THE NUMBER OF PRACTICAL SESSIONS

Within the Chemical Engineering degree framework, the students use to have huge amount of subjects that, very often, have little intersection between them, which may provide a global vision of an applied Chemical Engineering Project.

The present work has been developed by lecturers and professors from University of Girona and it pretends to exhibit the results of the application of an integrated project developed by Chemical Engineering students during their fourth and last academic course. The above mentioned integrated project was developed by twelve students in the framework of the subject Special Chemical Technologies. The main purpose was to provide the students a panorama of how to develop a Chemical Engineering Project and, moreover, to able them to develop their own research in view of that they are supposed to develop a Final Degree Project at the end of their Bachelor Degree.

In this sense, the lessons were distributed as follows: 35 hours of practical sessions and 15 hours of theory and problems. During these 35 hours, the students were involved directly in the project acquiring knowledge near to the industrial practices and strongly related with subjects from their curriculum. In addition, most of the knowledge imparted during the subject is strongly related with new research developed by LEPAMAP research group, in the University of Girona. In this sense, students were able to see how research can be cross-linked with industrial practices and, therefore, the final application of the “beta-products and technologies” developed in laboratories. The project involved the typical stages of any industrial process, which implies provisioning of residues, raw material preparation, fiber manufacturing, development of different products and technical product properties assessment.

The raw material used was triticale straw and it was used for the production of cellulose nanofibers (CNF) by different methods (depending on technical and economic aspects), packaging paper (reinforced with the obtained CNF, if needed) and natural-fiber reinforced composite materials based on polyolefin and bio-based matrices such as PLA. Each developed product was characterized technically and economically.

From a pedagogical point of view, the twelve students involved in the project acquired knowledge related to industry and new technologies which are being developed. Moreover, at the end of the subject, the students were not evaluated solving any exam. They were asked to develop an approximately fifty-page document describing all the processes and technologies studied in the subject. In this sense, the students had the opportunity to experience how is working in a human team, stablishing collaborative links between them.

As a conclusion, the implemented methodology allowed the students to develop an industrial-based project involving new products and technologies from a research group from the University of Girona, where they acquired the capacity to exchange ideas with their fellows and to develop a final document were all the work was summarized. Moreover, it must be said that more than 50% of the students are currently developing a Final Degree Project related to papermaking, and some of them decided to follow the work developed during the subject.